New Collected Poems Read online

  SONG IN A YEAR OF CATASTROPHE

  I began to be followed by a voice saying:

  “It can’t last. It can’t last.

  Harden yourself. Harden yourself.

  Be ready. Be ready.”

  “Go look under the leaves,”

  it said, “for what is living there

  is long dead in your tongue.”

  And it said, “Put your hands

  into the earth. Live close

  to the ground. Learn the darkness.

  Gather round you all

  the things that you love, name

  their names, prepare

  to lose them. It will be

  as if all you know were turned

  around within your body.”

  And I went and put my hands

  into the ground, and they took root

  and grew into a season’s harvest.

  I looked behind the veil

  of the leaves, and heard voices

  that I knew had been dead

  in my tongue years before my birth.

  I learned the dark.

  And still the voice stayed with me.

  Waking in the early mornings,

  I could hear it, like a bird

  bemused among the leaves,

  a mockingbird idly singing

  in the autumn of catastrophe:

  “Be ready. Be ready.

  Harden yourself. Harden yourself.”

  And I heard the sound

  of a great engine pounding

  in the air, and a voice asking:

  “Change or slavery?

  Hardship or slavery?”

  and voices answering:

  “Slavery! Slavery!”

  And I was afraid, loving

  what I knew would be lost.

  Then the voice following me said:

  “You have not yet come close enough.

  Come nearer the ground. Learn

  from the woodcock in the woods

  whose feathering is a ritual

  of the fallen leaves,

  and from the nesting quail

  whose speckling makes her hard to see

  in the long grass.

  Study the coat of the mole.

  For the farmer shall wear

  the furrows and the greenery

  of his fields, and bear

  the long standing of the woods.”

  And I asked: “You mean death, then?”

  “Yes,” the voice said. “Die

  into what the earth requires of you.”

  I let go all holds then, and sank

  like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

  and at last came fully into the ease

  and the joy of that place,

  all my lost ones returning.

  9/28/68

  THE CURRENT

  Having once put his hand into the ground,

  seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,

  a man has made a marriage with his place,

  and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.

  His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.

  It has reached into the dark like a root

  and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness,

  a flickering sap coursing upward into his head

  so that he sees the old tribespeople bend

  in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening

  to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,

  their lodges and graves, and closing again.

  He is made their descendant, what they left

  in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.

  And he sees the bearers of his own blood arriving,

  the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,

  their hands gathering the stones up into walls,

  and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground

  to lie still under the black wheels of machines.

  The current flowing to him through the earth

  flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,

  a young man who has reached into the ground,

  his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

  THE MAD FARMER REVOLUTION

  being a fragment

  of the natural history of New Eden,

  in homage

  to Mr. Ed McClanahan, one of the locals

  The mad farmer, the thirsty one,

  went dry. When he had time

  he threw a visionary high

  lonesome on the holy communion wine.

  “It is an awesome event

  when an earthen man has drunk

  his fill of the blood of a god,”

  people said, and got out of his way.

  He plowed the churchyard, the

  minister’s wife, three graveyards

  and a golf course. In a parking lot

  he planted a forest of little pines.

  He sanctified the groves,

  dancing at night in the oak shades

  with goddesses. He led

  a field of corn to creep up

  and tassel like an Indian tribe

  on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins

  ran out to the ends of their vines

  to follow him. Ripe plums

  and peaches reached into his pockets.

  Flowers sprang up in his tracks

  everywhere he stepped. And then

  his planter’s eye fell on

  that parson’s fair fine lady

  again. “O holy plowman,” cried she,

  “I am all grown up in weeds.

  Pray, bring me back into good tilth.”

  He tilled her carefully

  and laid her by, and she

  did bring forth others of her kind,

  and others, and some more.

  They sowed and reaped till all

  the countryside was filled

  with farmers and their brides sowing

  and reaping. When they died

  they became two spirits of the woods.

  THE CONTRARINESS OF THE MAD FARMER

  I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my

  inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission

  to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.

  I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,

  and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,

  and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,

  in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught

  so often laughing at funerals, that was because

  I knew the dead were already slipping away,

  preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

  And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed

  my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom

  had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not

  be resurrected by a piece of cake. “Dance,” they told me,

  and I stood still, and while they stood

  quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

  “Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself

  in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray

  into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

  When they said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,”

  I told them, “He’s dead.” And when they told me,

  “God is dead,” I answered, “He goes fishing every day

  in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.”

  When they asked me would I like to contribute

  I said no, and when they had collected

  more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.

  When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,

  and then went off by myself and did more

  than they would have asked. “Well, then,” they said,

  “go and organize the International Brotherhood

  of Contraries,” and I said, “Did y
ou finish killing

  everybody who was against peace?” So be it.

  Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

  thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

  I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

  way to come to the truth. It is one way.

  THE FARMER AND THE SEA

  The sea always arriving,

  hissing in pebbles, is breaking

  its edge where the landsman

  squats on his rock. The dark

  of the earth is familiar to him,

  close mystery of his source

  and end, always flowering

  in the light and always

  fading. But the dark of the sea

  is perfect and strange,

  the absence of any place,

  immensity on the loose.

  Still, he sees it is another

  keeper of the land, caretaker,

  shaking the earth, breaking it,

  clicking the pieces, but somewhere

  holding deep fields yet to rise,

  shedding its richness on them

  silently as snow, keeper and maker

  of places wholly dark. And in him

  something dark applauds.

  EARTH AND FIRE

  In this woman the earth speaks.

  Her words open in me, cells of light

  flashing in my body, and make a song

  that I follow toward her out of my need.

  The pain I have given her I wear

  like another skin, tender, the air

  around me flashing with thorns.

  And yet such joy as I have given her

  sings in me and is part of her song.

  The winds of her knees shake me

  like a flame. I have risen up from her,

  time and again, a new man.

  THE MAD FARMER IN THE CITY

  “. . . a field woman is a portion

  of the field; she has somehow lost

  her own margin . . .” THOMAS HARDY

  As my first blow against it, I would not stay.

  As my second, I learned to live without it.

  As my third, I went back one day and saw

  that my departure had left a little hole

  where some of its strength was flowing out,

  and I heard the earth singing beneath the street.

  Singing quietly myself, I followed the song

  among the traffic. Everywhere I went, singing,

  following the song, the stones cracked,

  and I heard it stronger. I heard it strongest

  in the presence of women. There was one I met

  who had the music of the ground in her, and she

  was its dancer. “O Exile,” I sang, “for want of you

  there is a tree that has borne no leaves

  and a planting season that will not turn warm.”

  Looking at her, I felt a tightening of roots

  under the pavement, and I turned and went

  with her a little way, dancing beside her.

  And I saw a black woman still inhabiting

  as in a dream the space of the open fields

  where she had bent to plant and gather. She stood

  rooted in the music I heard, pliant and proud

  as a stalk of wheat with the grain heavy. No man

  with the city thrusting angles in his brain

  is equal to her. To reach her he must tear it down.

  Wherever lovely women are the city is undone,

  its geometry broken in pieces and lifted,

  its streets and corners fading like mist at sunrise

  above groves and meadows and planted fields.

  THE BIRTH (NEAR PORT WILLIAM)

  They were into the lambing, up late.

  Talking and smoking around their lantern,

  they squatted in the barn door, left open

  so the quiet of the winter night

  diminished what they said. The chill

  had begun to sink into their clothes.

  Now and then they raised their hands

  to breathe on them. The youngest one

  yawned and shivered.

  “Damn,” he said,

  “I’d like to be asleep. I’d like to be

  curled up in a warm nest like an old

  groundhog, and sleep till spring.”

  “When I was your age, Billy, it wasn’t

  sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.

  “Last few years here I’ve took to sleeping.”

  And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring

  you’d have to have a trust in things

  the way animals do. Been a long time,

  I reckon, since people felt safe enough

  to sleep more than a night. You might

  wake up someplace you didn’t go to sleep at.”

  They hushed a while, as if to let the dark

  brood on what they had said. Behind them

  a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.

  It was getting close to midnight.

  Later they would move back along the row

  of penned ewes, making sure the newborn

  lambs were well dried, and had sucked,

  and then they would go home cold to bed.

  The barn stood between the ridgetop

  and the woods along the bluff. Below

  was the valley floor and the river

  they could not see. They could hear

  the wind dragging its underside

  through the bare branches of the woods.

  And suddenly the wind began to carry

  a low singing. They looked across

  the lantern at each other’s eyes

  and saw they all had heard. They stood,

  their huge shadows rising up around them.

  The night had changed. They were already

  on their way—dry leaves underfoot

  and mud under the leaves—to another barn

  on down along the woods’ edge,

  an old stripping room, where by the light

  of the open stove door they saw the man,

  and then the woman and the child

  lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.

  “Well, look a there,” the old man said.

  “First time this ever happened here.”

  And Billy, looking, and looking away,

  said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”

  And Raymond said: “There’s a first

  time, they say, for everything.”

  And that

  he thought, was as reassuring as anything

  was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.

  They did what they could. Not much.

  They brought a piece of rug and some sacks

  to ease the hard bed a little, and one

  wedged three dollar bills into a crack

  in the wall in a noticeable place.

  And they stayed on, looking, looking away,

  until finally the man said they were well

  enough off, and should be left alone.

  They went back to their sheep. For a while

  longer they squatted by their lantern

  and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred

  by wonder—old Stanley too, though he would not

  say so.

  “Don’t make no difference,” he said.

  “They’ll have ‘em anywhere. Looks like a man

  would have a right to be born in bed, if not

  die there, but he don’t.”

  “But you heard

  that singing in the wind,” Billy said.

  “What about that?”

  “Ghosts. They do that way.”

  “Not that way.”

  “Scared him, it did.”

  The old man laughed. “We’ll have to hold

  his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”

  “It don’t even bother
you,” Billy said.

  “You go right on just the same. But you heard.”

  “Now that I’m old I sleep in the dark.

  That ain’t what I used to do in it. I heard

  something.”

  “You heard a good deal more

  than you’ll understand,” Raymond said,

  “or him or me either.”

  They looked at him.

  He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable

  belief. He could believe in tomorrow

  before it became today—a human enough

  failing, and they were tolerant.

  He said:

  “It’s the old ground trying it again.

  Solstice, seeding and birth—it never

  gets enough. It wants the birth of a man

  to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk

  of corn. It’s not death that makes the dead

  rise out of the ground, but something alive

  straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.

  That’s what you heard. If you’re in the right mind

  when it happens, it can come on you strong;

  you might hear music passing on the wind,

  or see a light where there wasn’t one before.”

  “Well, how do you know if it amounts to anything?”

  “You don’t. It usually don’t. It would take

  a long time to ever know.”

  But that night

  and other nights afterwards, up late,

  there was a feeling in them—familiar

  to them, but always startling in its strength—

  like the thought, on a winter night,

  of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,

  and the thought of the wild creatures warm

  asleep in their nests, deep underground.

  AWAKE AT NIGHT

  Late in the night I pay

  the unrest I owe

  to the life that has never lived

  and cannot live now.

  What the world could be

  is my good dream

  and my agony when, dreaming it,

  I lie awake and turn

  and look into the dark.

  I think of a luxury

  in the sturdiness and grace

  of necessary things, not

  in frivolity. That would heal

  the earth, and heal men.

  But the end, too, is part

  of the pattern, the last

  labor of the heart:

  to learn to lie still,

  one with the earth

  again, and let the world go.

  PRAYERS AND SAYINGS OF THE MAD FARMER

  for James Baker Hall